People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would “yield ~10 s g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water.”
![](https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/csz/news/tmb/2019/amaterialway.jpg)
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-silica-aerogel-mars-habitable.html